Mayor of Bev Hills:

Welcome to Beverly Hills, you have arrived, the Plastic Surgery Capital of the World!

Narrator:

It's true—over 3 million nips and tucks, lifts and pinches are done each year along the west coast.Hollywood beckons, but how will they know if they'll be camera ready?

Robert Kotler, MD, FACS Cosmetic Surgeon:

So you see without being radical, the face on the right looks younger than the face on the left.

Narrator:

At the Beverly Hills office of cosmetic surgeon Dr. Robert Kotler, patients can work with a computer imaging specialist to craft their new face before undergoing the knife.Why not pull even more of the cheek up?

Robert Kotler, MD, FACS Cosmetic Surgeon:

It would distort. Yeah. In fact, then we would have to depict the distortion that would follow, distortion meaning that if one pulled too much on the cheeks and the lower face, you'd distort the mouth.Occasionally you see that through an ill conceived procedure.

Narrator:

A lot of celebrities.

Robert Kotler, MD, FACS Cosmetic Surgeon:

Yeah. They just, It looks wrong.

Narrator:

What if critics were to say, well how do you know you're going to be able to deliver that look?

Robert Kotler, MD, FACS Cosmetic Surgeon:

Right. A great question. My answer is the doctor should be able to show examples of what we call the triptic, the three views, the before, the predicted and the actual.So here's a gal with an extremely wide nose on the front. She really had two distinct problems. On the front, her nose is very wide in the lower half.Not too wide up between the eyes. That made it a little challenging. The predicted result is in the middle, and the result at 4 months is on the right.Here she had a nose that was unusually droopy. It was, it had an aged look to it. The computer prediction is in the middle and then the result is on the right.

Narrator:

But what if your surgeon doesn't offer such a high-tech solution?

Robert Kotler, MD, FACS Cosmetic Surgeon:

The nose have been narrowed, the tip refined.

Narrator:

Wowwwww. Before and after photos -- it's how the stars got by before the age of computers.

Robert Kotler, MD, FACS Cosmetic Surgeon:

The before and after album is almost a catalog of the doctor's talent.And you should see a lot of them, because if you have a lot of different cases for example, you're going to probably find somebody in that album that sort of has, had your needs too.I think you also need to see, how's the quality of these photos?Does everybody afterwards not have wrinkles because the lighting is different, or the angle is different?You know, you gotta be a pretty sharp consumer today. You can wash out a lot of wrinkles with lighting and makeup.

Narrator:

They certainly know all about that in Hollywood! For WebMD, I'm Sandee LaMotte.